Thursday, December 05, 2019

On The Eve Of The 2019 Kennedy Center Honors — Long Live The Queen Of Rock

This blogger remembers the first time he heard her voice — on a drive home from a grad achool class. It was Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys on a newly-released record, "Different Drum" (1967). The song was written in 1965 by Mike Nesmith of The Monkees (a pop rock band in the Beatlemania era). Wow! The blogger fought the urge to pull off the road and just listen. The sound, like her name, was genuine and unique. Now she is being honored for her performances in country, rock, musical theater and traditional Mexican music. She is a national treasure. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration for great talent, so be it.


[x WaPo — DC Fishwrap]
Linda Ronstadt Never Stopped Singing
By Ellen McCarthy


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Try telling Linda Ronstadt where she can’t go, what she can’t do. Go ahead.

But before you try, picture her at age 4, not yet in kindergarten, riding a pony fast and free through the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, evading rattlesnakes and adult supervision.

Picture her as a teenager, giving her parents only a couple hours’ notice before riding off to Los Angeles to be a singer. Picture her performing for stadium crowds, a megastar with big brown eyes and short shorts, the dream girl of a generation, taking on folk, rock, pop, country, Latin music and American standards.

Picture her doing anything other than watching her own induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, let alone attending the ceremony. Picture her showing up to the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts from Barack Obama, then picture that medal collecting dust under her bed.

Which is probably where the Kennedy Center Honors [12/08/2019] she’ll receive this month will also be stashed (she at least plans to “suffer through” that ceremony in person), because all of that — the reverence, the recognition — isn’t important to her. The only important thing to Linda Ronstadt, ever, has been the part you can’t picture: the experience of singing. Singing what she wants, when she wants, in relentless pursuit of perfection.

“It tells what I am,” she said in an interview last month at her home in San Francisco.

Ronstadt’s not a songwriter. Her fans are an afterthought, her fame an annoyance. Singing is the thing. It’s her obsession, her identity, her release. It is her pony and her desert.

Is. Was.

Picture her now, at 73, confined in a body that mostly just shuffles haltingly through the house. A degenerative disease, similar to Parkinson’s, has stolen her voice, along with her abilities to ride and run and strum a guitar.

That theft marked an obvious loss for the musical world, and, it would seem, an incalculable one for her. Because as far as anyone can tell, Linda Ronstadt can’t sing anymore.

But try telling her that. Go ahead.

Ronstadt lifts her legs onto a settee in her whitewashed living room a few blocks from the Bay. From here she can look out the French doors to a garden still blooming with hydrangeas. Everything is just as she prefers. Bookshelves overflowing. Black-and-white photos of her parents on the grand piano. An original print from Disney’s “Snow White” front and center on the mantel.

“I like to do whatever I want,” she shrugs. “Within reason.”

What she doesn’t want to do is drink the water her longtime assistant puts next to her, though she knows she should. Her appetite is diminished, along with her mobility. But she also doesn’t want to spend time feeling sorry for herself, she doesn’t want to listen to her old albums, and she certainly doesn’t want to talk about her reign as the Queen of Rock.

“I thought I did pretty well,” she says, “But I didn’t think I was the greatest at anything.”

Rolling Stone deemed Ronstadt “America’s best-known female rock singer” in 1978. By then she’d put out hit recordings of Clint Ballard Jr.’s “You’re No Good,” Roy Orbison and Joe Melson’s “Blue Bayou,” and Warren Zevon’s “Poor Poor Pitiful Me.” But as far as Ronstadt is concerned, she “didn’t really start singing until about 1980.” Meaning, she didn’t start singing to her own satisfaction until then.

Ronstadt’s fans are far less critical. Between 1969 and 2009, she released more than 30 albums, won 10 Grammys, had 21 Top 40 hits. For four decades, she was ubiquitous.

And then she was gone. Because if she couldn’t sing to her own satisfaction, she’d rather not sing at all.

Even if it meant giving up a lifelong vocation, one she felt was sealed in her genes before birth. Ronstadt’s paternal grandfather, a Mexican immigrant who ran a hardware store, was the conductor of a brass band. Her father was a baritone crooner who played venues around Tucson. Her brother was a soloist with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus. Ronstadt was 4 years old when she decided she was a singer, after joining her older siblings in a song around their piano and hearing her older sister remark, “Think we got a soprano here.”

“I remember thinking, ‘I’m a singer, that’s what I do,’ ” Ronstadt wrote in her memoir, Simple Dreams (2013).It was like I had become validated somehow, my existence affirmed.”

She spent endless childhood hours by the radio, listening to American folk songs and Mexican ballads. If there were musicians on the street or a concert in town, she was drawn like a supercharged magnet. “I wanted to learn everything I could learn,” she explains, brushing away a strand of lavender hair dyed to match the color of her soft sweater.

As a teenager, she performed with her brother and sister around Tucson, but she always preferred singing at home, without a microphone. To Ronstadt, singing was a verb, maybe even a calling — not a ticket to fame or fortune. “I didn’t think about it in terms of being on the stage,” she says. “I just thought about singing.”

In 1965, Ronstadt dropped out of college after one semester, broke the news to her parents — who were devastated but handed her $30 so she wouldn’t starve — and headed to the West Coast. She moved into a beachside bungalow in Santa Monica and started playing coffee shops with two buddies, who together called themselves the Stone Poneys. The group had a breakout hit, “Different Drum,” that got airtime on the radio as they toured through what Ronstadt remembers mostly as “roach parlors” around the country. Ronstadt, with a crystalline voice and lungs that seemed to elevate every note to the heavens, attracted industry attention almost immediately.

“Somebody recommended to me that I go to the Bitter End [a nightclub in Greenwich Village] to hear this extraordinary woman sing,” recalls Peter Asher, a producer who worked for the Beatles’ record label and was managing James Taylor’s career. “And everything they told me was true. That she was extraordinarily beautiful and she was an amazing singer. She sang barefoot in these really short shorts. And that everything about her was spectacularly exciting in every way.”

Another young talent in her position might have been vulnerable to the pressures of industry executives with opinions about what she should be singing, but Ronstadt had her own ideas. Choosing songs was as much a part of her talent as singing them. Ronstadt didn’t write her own material, but was an exacting interpreter — more Yo-Yo Ma than Bob Dylan, with an instrument that just happened to be lodged in her throat. If a line in a song spoke to her life, she’d work it through ceaselessly until she had refit it for her own voice.

In her memoir, Rondstadt recalls the moment a friend sang her a few lines from a song called “Heart Like a Wheel” by a Canadian songwriter, Anna McGarrigle.

And my love for you is like a sinking ship

And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean


“I felt like a bomb had exploded in my head,” she wrote. Ronstadt ingested the song, recorded it and released it into our collective consciousness.

That was the part she loved. The rest of it — the fans, the money, the acclaim — was beside the point.

“It wasn’t what I was after,” she says. “I just sort of did music regardless of the audience. I didn’t think about my fans.”

This apathy toward the supposed rewards of fame protected Ronstadt from many of its pitfalls. A staffer on “The Johnny Cash Show” knocked on her hotel room late one night, demanded to be let in and then proceeded to take off all his clothes, she says. He told her he could opendoors for her professionally, help her land more television appearances. Ronstadt, then in her early 20s, just laughed. “I said, ‘I hate singing on television!’ ” she recalls. “He didn’t have anything he could hold over me.”

Ronstadt soon got a reputation for being difficult. Asher, who eventually signed on to be both her producer and manager, blames sexism as much as anything. “In that era, there was a ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head’ factor,” he says. “She couldn’t actually be super-intelligent and well-read and interesting if she’s that beautiful. . . . But she happens to be both.”

But it’s true that she was uncompromising. In 1980, at the height of her hitmaking power — after she’d toured with the Doors, had the members of the Eagles as her backup band and became the first woman to sell out stadiums — she left Los Angeles to join the Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Advisers and friends, worried it would be a career-killer, warned against it. She did it anyway. Afterward, she wanted to record an album of old standards by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and the like. She heard repeatedly that audiences would balk. She did it anyway. When she decided to make a record of Mexican music, she was told it would flop. It was released in 1987, went double platinum and became the highest-selling non-English album in American history.

That was the happiest chapter of her career. Because she was in full control, both of the music and her ability to sing it.

Then, in 2000, as she was recording a song with Emmylou Harris, she detected something wrong in her voice. “It was like something had grabbed my vocal cords and stopped them,” she says. “Like a hand had just grabbed it and was squeezing.”

For years, no one believed her. They blamed her perfectionism. As time went on, her pitch started to go and her voice lost its range. Doctors could offer no explanation. But she wasn’t willing to put out albums that weren’t up to her standards.

Now, picture her onstage for the last time. It was November 7, 2009, in San Antonio. She is in her glory, performing with Mexican dancers and a full mariachi band. As she stood there, “every show I ever did flashed before my eyes,” she recalls. “It ran like a movie in front of me.”

When she was done, she went home and burned her stage clothes.

“The cat goes outside,” Ronstadt says as the fog rolls in and her fireplace crackles. “He tells me what’s going on out there.”

It is 10 years to the day since her last show. Now, she says, she’ll go 10 days at a stretch without leaving the house. She can still walk, though gingerly, and even add a log to the fire when it gets low. But her hands tremble, and even sitting upright becomes painful after a while.

“But I haven’t been bored, and I haven’t been depressed,” she says. “As long as I have a good book, I’m not bored.”

There are people around, much of the time. In her early 40s, Ronstadt adopted two children who are now young adults living in San Francisco. Ronstadt’s beloved assistant, Janet Stark, is with her five days a week. And every Sunday, a professional chef cooks brunch for whoever is around. Sometimes Bonnie Raitt comes over for tea. “We discuss what it was like to be girl singers on the road.” When Emmylou Harris is in town, she brings over her laundry. It’s fun, Ronstadt says, but “not as much fun as singing together.”

Ronstadt had several high-profile romances — including with politician Jerry Brown and filmmaker George Lucas — but she never married. “I have no talent for it,” she explains. “Not a shred. I don’t like to compromise. If I want a pink sofa and somebody doesn’t want a pink sofa, I’m not going to go for that. I want the pink sofa.” (She got the pink sofa, and it still sits in her living room, though today it wears a white slipcover.)

Compromising with illness has been a challenge. It was more than a decade of frustration from the time Ronstadt noticed her instrument beginning to fail her to the time she was diagnosed, in 2012. (Doctors thought it was Parkinson’s at first, but Ronstadt recently got a diagnosis of progressive supranuclear palsy.) She has tried to adopt an attitude of “radical acceptance” about her condition, but what she misses most — besides knitting — is singing with her friends and family.

Which is not to say she isn’t singing at all. She is. Almost incessantly. Sometimes involuntarily. She sings as she putters around the house. As she strokes the cat. As she talks to friends.

It’s just not audible to anyone but her.

She wakes up most mornings to the sound of the “Missouri Waltz” played by clarinets on the jukebox in her head. She hates it. “I don’t like the lyrics. I don’t like the tune. And I don’t like it with clarinets,” Ronstadt fumes. “But that’s what it plays.”

To drive it out, she’ll learn a new song.

“I can still sing in my brain,” she says. “I have to keep the seed alive.”

Go ahead, try telling her she can’t — not really.

Then picture her alone in her home, on her pink sofa with the white slipcover, deep in focus. Picture her working out the phrasing, the rhythm and harmonies just as she always did; and then singing it, in perfect silence, to the only listener who ever mattered. ###

[Ellen McCarthy began her career at The Washington Post in 2001, covering local technology companies for the Business section. For several years she wrote The Download, a weekly column about the D.C. tech scene. In 2006, she moved to the Weekend section to cover arts and entertainment. From 2009 to 2013, she anchored the Style section’s On Love page, writing extensively about weddings, love and relationships. Today she writes feature stories and profiles for Style. She has written The Real Thing: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter's Notebook (2015). McCarthy received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany.]

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Today — A Cautionary Tale About Impeachment, 2019-Style

William Faulkner created an incredible character named Flem Snopes in three of many novels about a mythical county in Mississippi.Snopes, born a poor white, managed by both lawful and unlawful means to climb to the top of the social pyramid in frictional Yoknapatawpha County in the Mississippi Delta. The imaginary Snopes was an improbable version of a real-life Lyin' King (The Lyin' King of New Yoek City). William Faulkner created Snopesism as a powerful and evil phenomenon in early 20th-century Mississippi and as we move into the third decade of the 21st-century in the United States, we must deal with the phenomenon of Trumpism. If this is a (fair & balanced) parallel explanation of a virtually incurable socio-political malady, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump Is The Founders’ Worst Nightmare
By Bob Bauer


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Donald Trump’s Republican congressional allies are throwing up different defenses against impeachment and hoping that something may sell. They say that he didn’t seek a corrupt political bargain with Ukraine, but that if he did, he failed, and the mere attempt is not impeachable. Or that it is not clear that he did it, because the evidence against him is unreliable “hearsay.”

It’s all been very confusing. But the larger story — the crucial constitutional story — is not the incoherence of the president’s defense. It is more that he and his party are exposing limits of impeachment as a response to the presidency of a demagogue.

The founders feared the demagogue, who figures prominently in the Federalist Papers as the politician who, possessing “perverted ambition,” pursues relentless self-aggrandizement “by the confusions of their country.” The last of the papers, Federalist No. 85, linked demagogy to its threat to the constitutional order — to the “despotism” that may be expected from the “victorious demagogue.” This “despotism” is achieved through systematic lying to the public, vilification of the opposition and, as James Fenimore Cooper wrote in an essay on demagogues [PDF], a claimed right to disregard “the Constitution and the laws” in pursuing what the demagogue judges to be the “interests of the people.”

Should the demagogue succeed in winning the presidency, impeachment in theory provides the fail-safe protection. And yet the demagogue’s political tool kit, it turns out, may be his most effective defense. It is a constitutional paradox: The very behaviors that necessitate impeachment supply the means for the demagogue to escape it.

As the self-proclaimed embodiment of the American popular will, the demagogue portrays impeachment deliberations as necessarily a threat to democracy, a facade for powerful interests arrayed against the people that only he represents. Critics and congressional opponents are traitors. Norms and standing institutional interests are fraudulent.

President Trump has made full use of the demagogic playbook. He has refused all cooperation with the House. He lies repeatedly about the facts, holds public rallies to spread these falsehoods and attacks the credibility, motives and even patriotism of witnesses. His mode of “argument” is purely assaultive. This is the crux of the Trump defense, and not an argument built on facts in support of a constitutional theory of the case.

Of course, all the presidents who have faced impeachment mounted a political defense, to go with their legal and constitutional case. And it is not unusual that they — and, even more vociferously, their allies — will attack the process as a means of undoing an election.

The difference in Mr. Trump’s case is not merely one of degree. Richard Nixon despised his opposition, convinced of their bad faith and implacable hatred for him. But it is hard to imagine Mr. Trump choosing (and actually meaning) these words to conclude, as Nixon did, a letter to the chair of Judiciary Committee: “[If] the committee desires further information from me… I stand ready to answer, under oath, pertinent written interrogatories, and to be interviewed under oath by you and the ranking minority member at the White House.”

Mr. Trump has instead described Adam Schiff, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as a “corrupt” politician who shares with other “human scum” the objective of running the “most unfair hearings in American history.”

These remarks are not merely one more instance of Mr. Trump’s failure to curb his impulses. This is his constitutional defense strategy. Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, informing the House of the president’s refusal to cooperate, declared that the impeachment process is unconstitutional and invalid — a “naked political strategy” — and advised that the president would not participate. It matters that the president’s lawyer, in a formal communication with the House, used rhetoric that might have been expected from the hardest-core political supporters. Once again, contrasts with past impeachments are illuminating. Bill Clinton’s White House counsel Charles Ruff testified before the House Judiciary Committee, pledging to “assist you in performing your constitutional duties.”

The demagogue may be boundlessly confident in his own skills and force of political personality, but he cannot succeed on those alone. He can thrive only in political conditions conducive to the effective practice of these dark arts, such as widespread distrust of institutions, a polarized polity and a fractured media environment in which it is possible to construct alternative pictures of social realities. Weak political parties now fall quickly into line with a demagogue who can bring intense pressure to bear on party officials and officeholders through his hold on “the base.” As we have seen with Mr. Trump, the demagogue can bully his party into being an instrument of his will, silencing or driving out dissenters. Republican officeholders know that Mr. Trump can take to Twitter or to Fox News or to the podium at rallies — or all of the above — to excoriate them for a weak will or disloyalty.

This is how the Republican Party has become Mr. Trump’s party. It is also why that party will not conceive of its role in impeachment as entailing a constitutional responsibility independent of the president’s political and personal interests. It has come to see those interests as indistinguishable from its own. In this way the constitutional defense of the case against Mr. Trump and the defense of his own interests become one and the same. As another fabled demagogue, Huey Long of Louisiana, famously announced: “I’m the Constitution around here now.”

The implications for the constitutional impeachment process are dire. Until Mr. Trump, modern impeachment has ended with some generally positive assessment of its legacy. Nixon’s resignation appeared to indicate that serious charges could bring the parties together in defense of the rule of law. “The system worked” was a popular refrain, even if this was a somewhat idealized and oversimplified version of events. The Clinton impeachment suggested that the standards for an impeachable offense required a distinction between public misconduct and private morality, and Congress reclaimed its responsibility for impeachment from an independent counsel statute that was allowed to lapse.

The Trump impeachment is headed toward a very different summation. A demagogue can claim that Congress has forfeited the right to recognition of its impeachment power, then proceed to unleash a barrage of falsehoods and personal attacks to confuse the public, cow legislators and intimidate witnesses. So long as the demagogue’s party controls one of the two chambers of Congress, this strategy seems a sure bet.

When this is all over, we will not hear warm bipartisan praise for how “the system worked.” The lesson will be that, in the politics of the time, a demagogue who gets into the Oval Office is hard to get out. ###

[Robert F. (Bob) Bauer is a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at New York University School of Law and served as a White House counsel under President Barack Obama. He received a BA magna cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA) and a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law.]

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